My hosted Exchange provider started act­ing weird again recently, and I decided I’d had enough. At the same time, the new Live Mesh client that was sup­posed to improve com­pat­i­bil­ity with Win­dows 7 started caus­ing my net­book to freeze up (solid, no mov­ing the mouse pointer even) about five min­utes after boot­ing up. Now while the ratio­nal thing might be to switch to a dif­fer­ent Exchange provider, I decided to shake up my whole com­put­ing ecosys­tem and see what was involved in liv­ing La Vida Google.

Exchange email to Gmail

This was prob­a­bly the eas­i­est tran­si­tion to make, because of the way I was using my email in the first place. When some­one sends me an email to jeff@jeffkirvin.net, it goes first to my domain host, then redi­rects to Gmail, then gets aut­o­for­warded to my Exchange provider. So all I had to do was turn off that for­ward­ing, and start using Gmail as my mail client instead of Out­look. Frankly, this has worked out bet­ter than I expected on my net­book, since I don’t have the over­head of run­ning Out­look to deal with any­more. A lot less ran­dom (The pro­gram is not respond­ing) mes­sages in title­bars now.

It was a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing to make the switch from Exchange to Gmail as the email client on my phone. Win­dows Mobile is, obvi­ously, designed to work with Exchange. Set­ting it up for any­thing else is a lot less auto­matic. I opted to go with Google’s IMAP option rather than POP, which meant I wasn’t able to use Microsoft’s auto­mated setup (which defaults to POP). I went with IMAP for two rea­sons. One, it syn­chro­nizes with other mail clients should I decide later I’d rather use some­thing like Win­dows Live Mail or Mozilla Thun­der­bird on my Win­dows 7 machines instead of Gmail’s web inter­face, and two, it sup­ports sub­fold­ers for labeled items, par­tic­u­larly starred items. I went through the man­ual IMAP setup instructed pro­vided by Google, and have email sync­ing to my Touch Pro with­out a hitch. It’s not push, like my Exchange email was (Google doesn’t fully sup­port the IMAP IDLE pro­to­col), but I’m okay with pulling new mes­sages every 15 min­utes. In fact, I might even change that to 30 or even 60 min­utes to reduce dis­trac­tions. If some­one needs to con­tact me quickly, there’s always SMS, Twit­ter, or an actual phone call.

Exchange cal­en­dar to Google Calendar

This was a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing. First I recre­ated every recur­ring appoint­ment I had in Exchange in Google Cal­en­dar. I could have exported from Out­look to .csv and then imported into Google Cal­en­dar, but I have only a dozen or so recur­ring appoint­ments and very few one-​off appoint­ments, so it was prob­a­bly faster to just recre­ate them, espe­cially given how easy it is to cre­ate new appoint­ments in Google Cal­en­dar. That took care of the desk­top easy enough, but mobile is a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing. For that, I had to down­load Goosync. A one year sub­scrip­tion is about $30, or you could go for $60 for a life­time sub­scrip­tion. This is way less than I was pay­ing for hosted Exchange, so it seemed like a no-​brainer. I down­loaded and installed the Goosync Win­dows Mobile client and set it to sync my cal­en­dar and con­tacts. It runs in the back­ground and syncs every half hour, which seems to work okay. Appoint­ments on the device retain full fidelity includ­ing repeat set­tings and alarms.

Exchange con­tacts to Gmail

I solved this the same way I solved the cal­en­dar issue, with Goosync. The one prob­lem I had was that I need to re-​add my con­tact pho­tos and weed out dozens of incom­plete con­tact records Google saved for me auto­mat­i­cally that I really don’t want. Once they’re set up, though, they work well enough in Win­dows Mobile for email, SMS and dialing.

Exchange tasks to Remem­ber The Milk

Gmail sup­ports tasks now, but the fea­ture is still in its infancy, and I can’t find any good way to sync them to other devices. So instead, I went with the most pop­u­lar of online task lists, Remem­ber The Milk. This has great inte­gra­tion with other ser­vices like Gmail, iGoogle, Twit­ter and SMS. I could use their MilkSync appli­ca­tion to sync tasks from the web inter­face directly to Win­dows Mobile’s Tasks appli­ca­tion, but since Tasks is gen­er­ally ignored by Touch­Flo 3D on my Touch Pro, it’s just as easy for me to man­age my tasks on the device in Opera through RTM’s mobile inter­face as it would be to keep them in the Tasks appli­ca­tion and dig that up every time.

Live Mesh to Google Docs

Don’t get me wrong, I love the con­cept behind Life Mesh, and it’s still tech­ni­cally a tech­nol­ogy pre­view, not even a beta. I’m sure the issues I’ve been hav­ing with it recently will be ironed out, espe­cially now that Mesh has been moved under Steve Sinofsky’s Win­dows divi­sion (which is on track for their best release ever in Win­dows 7). But for now, it’s just not sta­ble enough and requires way too much CPU, espe­cially on my Win­dows Mobile phone and my net­book. So instead, I’ve uploaded my cur­rent projects to Google Docs. This works well enough on my net­book and desk­top, though I can’t do much offline because Google Gears doesn’t sup­port Fire­fox 3.1b2 yet. It also means I can view, but not edit on my phone because Google Docs doesn’t sup­port that through their web inter­face. I’m still try­ing to come up with a way around this, but all I’ve come up with so far is sav­ing doc­u­ments from Google Docs to my desk­top, then using my phone’s drive mode to copy them to the phone, then reverse the process when I need to get the doc­u­ment from the phone back into Google Docs. Usu­ally this won’t be worth the trou­ble. I might just write new mate­r­ial in an email addressed to my Google Docs address and then copy and paste it where it should be the next time I’m online. Still not ideal, but it should work for the rare times I have to write some­thing on the phone. Writ­ing on the phone itself isn’t as big a deal for me as it used to be now that I carry my net­book every­where I go.

iGoogle or Gmail Labs?

On my phone, I’m access­ing my data pretty much the same way I always have, other than the afore­men­tioned dif­fer­ence with tasks. (Hey, Lla­m­a­graph­ics, any chance of a web-​based LifeBal­ance? You could knock RTM right off the map!) On my Win­dows 7 machines, though, I have more choices. I could keep using Out­look (right!), but even if I opt to go with the web inter­face, it’s still not cut and dried. I could use Gmail for every­thing, or I could use iGoogle, Google’s wid­get dri­ven home­page. Gmail labs offers the abil­ity to insert small side mod­ules for Cal­en­dar, Docs and RTM to the right and left of the mes­sage list, which has every­thing on one page, but pretty tiny, espe­cially on my net­book. It is nicely arranged, though. With iGoogle, I can spread stuff out over mul­ti­ple tabs, change the lay­out at will, and add in other stuff that I can’t do in Gmail. (Also, Gmail is blocked by con­tent fil­ters at the office, but Google isn’t.) I have three tabs set up in iGoogle. Orga­nizer con­tains Gmail, Google Cal­en­dar, Remem­ber The Milk and Weather. Media con­tains Google Docs, Google Reader for my RSS feeds and Google News. Social con­tains wid­gets for Twit­ter, Google Talk (my IM of choice), Face­book and MySpace. If I open these up in sep­a­rate tabs in Fire­fox, that’s pretty much every­thing I need for my daily use.

A method to my madness

And last, an ulte­rior motive. Part of the rea­son I’m tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to tran­si­tion off Exchange to some­thing a lit­tle more open is to make it eas­ier to move to a Palm Pre when they go on sale in March (yes, I’m stand­ing by that pre­dic­tion), or to an Android-​based vari­ant of the Touch HD. I’m still happy with Win­dows Mobile today, and with a lit­tle third party help and some choice reg­istry tweaks it can be as slick and mod­ern as any other mobile OS (more on that to come), but I’ll state pub­licly that I’m not sure they can over­come the pub­lic per­cep­tion that they’re “old and busted” before such rumor fes­ters into fact. For­tu­nately, cloud com­put­ing offers choices enough to build your own solutions.

There are shap­ing up to be four big ecosys­tems in com­put­ing. As all four diver­sify into the cat­e­gories below, I’m notic­ing that a lot of users are stan­dard­iz­ing on using every­thing from a sin­gle ven­dor, a silo­ing of the mar­ket rather than embrac­ing vari­ety. You can do nearly every­thing you need to do with offer­ings from any one of them, and they tend to work bet­ter if you don’t mix and match. But is it really pos­si­ble to put all your eggs in one basket?

Microsoft

Microsoft has, by far, the best selec­tion of the bunch, with every sin­gle cat­e­gory I could think of cov­ered. They have gone out of their way to pro­vide solu­tions for the office, liv­ing room and on the go. Some of the options here aren’t best-​in-​class (though I’d say the Zune is bet­ter than the iPod clas­sic and IE 8 can give Fire­fox and Chrome a run for their money if you give it chance), but they all work. And more impor­tantly, they all work together. If you use the soft­ware and ser­vices listed above, they inter­op­er­ate cleanly and effi­ciently, exactly the way con­ven­tional wis­dom says Microsoft doesn’t do. The biggest prob­lem Microsoft has is the snarky haters who have their minds made up and won’t give them a break.

Google

Google has a lot of gaps in their ecosys­tem offer­ings, but they make up for it with even bet­ter inte­gra­tion than Microsoft. Once you start using one Google prod­uct (Gmail seems to be the most pop­u­lar “gate­way drug” aside from search itself), it’s all too easy to start using the rest. But where Google wins in inter­op­er­abil­ity, they lose in power. Google Docs, for exam­ple, is fine for light use, but most users wouldn’t think of using it to com­pletely replace a more pow­er­ful desk­top office suite. Google also lacks an OS and vir­tu­ally any enter­tain­ment options. Even Google’s Android plat­form offers only the most basic media playback.

Apple

For Apple, inter­op­er­abil­ity is king, but it comes at the cost of choice. Apple’s offer­ings work seam­lessly together, often appear­ing to be one organic sys­tem, but heaven help you if you need to replace one of them because it doesn’t entirely meet your needs. Their gaps are fairly minor, and the lock-​in pro­vided by iTunes over portable media and home the­ater offer­ings keeps a lot of users in their camp.

Linux/​Open Source

The open source route is for the free spir­its out there who so don’t want to be in thrall to one com­pany that they’re will­ing to cob­ble together every­thing them­selves, even when it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily even try to work together. Think of these as the polar oppo­sites to the Apple users. A lot of this stuff is build your own, but at least most of it doesn’t require you to com­pile it your­self any­more. It’s also so frag­mented between dif­fer­ent Linux dis­tros (KDE and Gnome both have their own photo man­agers, and there are oth­ers as well if you don’t like those), that any kind of consensus-​based inter­op­er­abil­ity is unlikely.

Con­clu­sions, my ecosystem

I tried to stay within a sin­gle ecosys­tem, and my life would prob­a­bly be eas­ier if I did. But because of the var­i­ous gaps or miss­ing func­tion­al­ity, I’ve been forced to mix and match a bit, fully know­ing that that would be up to me to find my own ways to makes the pieces interoperate.

Most of my ecosys­tem is based on Microsoft offer­ings, but I’ve swapped out a bit from the Google and Open Source stacks where appro­pri­ate. Fire­fox per­forms bet­ter on my net­book than IE 8, and the IE Tab plu­gin allows me to use the IE ren­der­ing engine when I need it. Google Talk is lighter and less noisy than Live Mes­sen­ger, and I find Google’s search results a lit­tle bit more reli­able than Live Search’s. My blog­ging solu­tion is also a three-​headed mon­ster with some quick posts done in Live Writer but most of my blog­ging done in OneNote for early drafts, and then Word for post­ing. I’ve also bypassed Zune in favor of Win­dows Media Player and my Win­dows Mobile smart­phone, but I know peo­ple that use both.

What are your choices? Do you stick mostly to a sin­gle ven­dor, or do you play the field?

As you may have heard, Google has a “kill switch” fea­ture in Android that allows them to remotely remove soft­ware they deem mali­cious from Android-​based cell phones. While some poten­tial end users are up in arms about this fea­ture, the reac­tion from the devel­oper com­mu­nity has been much more mild.

Some of the appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers for Google’s Android plat­form said they weren’t aware of a kill switch fea­ture the ven­dor report­edly has put into its mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem, but they weren’t too sur­prised either. “We’re not too con­cerned. We’re not mak­ing mali­cious apps. It should be fine and I totally under­stand why they’d want to do it,” said Jeff Kao, co-​founder of Eco­rio, a Toronto-​based developer.

Google Android Devel­op­ers Not Sur­prised By Kill Switch — The Google Chan­nel — IT Chan­nel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness

Josh Curry and I dis­cussed this on the lat­est Max­i­mum Geek (Episode 28, just posted), and we came down squarely on oppo­site sides of the issue. Josh sees it as an abom­i­na­tion, yet another way Google can get cor­rupted by the power they wield. Per­son­ally, I don’t see it as much dif­fer­ent from Microsoft’s Mali­cious Soft­ware Removal Tool, which is installed with every copy of Win­dows that has auto­matic updates turned on. It gives Google a way to remove soft­ware that poses a real dan­ger to phones or net­works, but users have to trust that Google will use it only as a means of last resort. Most users and devel­op­ers seem will­ing to give Google the ben­e­fit of the doubt on this, where the same peo­ple were much more alarmed when the secre­tive and heavy-​handed Apple was revealed to have the same fea­ture on the iPhone (it’s prob­a­bly worth men­tion­ing that while the iPhone kill switch was a secret uncov­ered by code inspec­tion, Google spilled the beans on the Android kill switch themselves).

Go ahead and read Josh’s take and then let us know where you stand on the issue. Can Google be trusted to use this fea­ture benevolently?

Looks like the hon­ey­moon is already over for Chrome.

After its launch to a frenzy of news cov­er­age Chrome peaked with a 3.1% share of the browser mar­ket. Since then it’s been a steady decline, down to just over 1.5%. And it looks like it will stay that way.

Has Google’s browser peaked already? — Short Sharp Sci­ence — New Scientist

This isn’t actu­ally all that sur­pris­ing. It takes a while for some­thing enter­ing a crowded mar­ket with well-​established play­ers to gain mar­ket­share. The only rea­son peo­ple maybe expected Chrome to do bet­ter was because of the behe­moth Google name. As the arti­cle points out, Inter­net Explorer’s cut of the pie didn’t budge at all since before Chrome launched.

I tried to like Chrome, I really did. I could live with­out the exten­sions, even ad-​blocking. But what drove me from it was that in the end it felt like exactly what it was: a beta. A real beta, not like Gmail. Chrome lacks pol­ish, as it were. It locked up on me fre­quently and tended to get really con­fused if I had flash ani­ma­tions play­ing in mul­ti­ple tabs, which is prac­ti­cally a given when you don’t have ad-​blocking.

In the end, though, this might be part of Google’s mas­ter plan. They said up front that if Chrome got Fire­fox and IE to copy its inno­va­tions, they’d have done their job. If the web expe­ri­ence over­all improved, Google didn’t care if peo­ple used Chrome or not. IE8 beta 2 iso­lated tabs in sep­a­rate processes. Fire­fox 3.1 will allow users to drag tabs between browser win­dows. And both sport upgraded and much faster JavaScript engines. Mis­sion accom­plished, Chrome.